Ending overvaluing is the only way the housing market improves.
216 days. Which is 7 months. Or 31 weeks.
That’s the current average time it takes from putting your home up for sale, until exchange of contracts.
This is made up of: 62 days to find buyer and agree price (IF you can find a buyer, which more than half of sellers can’t)
plus
154 further days to exchange contracts, IF you exchange contracts at all, which more than 1/3rd don’t when their sale falls through.
Things made worse by overvaluing:
- Time to find a buyer (high asking prices are offputting)
- Time to exchange (buyers getting cold feet when they realise they’ve overpaid)
- Sales falling through: Lender’s down-valuing deals because the property was over-valued.
Nothing will improve until over-valuing stops.
Over-valuing won’t stop until the worst culprits are forcibly stropped (they force other agents to overvalue reluctantly).
There is no law against it. So they won’t stop.
Sellers need to understand that MOST agents will knowingly (even if reluctantly) overvalue their homes.
They need to understand that, at best, overvaluing by agents will delay their sale, and at worst it will result in them missing the market and not selling at all, while locked into an unfair contract.
Everyone needs to understand this.
Because overvaluing is killing the housing market, and affecting everyone’s chances of moving, buyers and sellers alike.
If you’re moving ‘up the ladder’, sliding house prices help you.
The zombie house-seller apocalypse is upon us.
And Rightmove (whose figures these are) think they’re helping by constantly reporting ‘record house prices’.
No one at Rightmove has any individual motivation to do anything about this. It’s an immensely profitable gravy boat, where no one will stand up for fear of rocking it.
But their ill-conceived ‘house price index’ is directly affecting the entire market, everyone’s moving chances, and good agents’ businesses.
On 27th June, at the BestAgent Day event I will be inviting the relatively new Rightmove CEO Johan Svanstrom, who is new to the property market, to discuss the possibility of reconsidering their monthly house price index format, with a view to coming up with something that actually helps movers and agents.
I don’t expect it will make any difference, because the US hedge funds who collectively own a controlling interest in Rightmove don’t care about the UK housing market, as long as they get their regular dividends and share buy-backs.
So they won’t allow RM to do anything differently. But there’s no harm in asking.
And when they don’t change, and BestAgent launches its new ‘exchange-price paid index’ which will make a mockery of their asking prices, they can’t say we didn’t warn them.
Everything rests on ending overvaluing.
Agents collectively possess the data to do this, today. BestAgent will enable this, and create an all-new, transparent, verifiable house price index which will render all the others meaningless, once and for all. And it won’t cost estate agents a penny to participate.
Yet collectively, they will be able to aim this new torpedo of transparency directly at Rightmove and all the worst overvaluing corporate agents, and finally put a stop to a disingenuous, borderline-fraudulent practice.
It’s just such a shame that none of the biggest companies in the property sector have any interest in transparency. Otherwise this would have happened years ago.
When the time comes, we will be asking for your help to spread the word. I hope you will. It will help everyone except those causing the problem.
